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Cofactor

The standard for data integration on the web

Use Cofactor IDs to link your structured data to other information sources. The canonical ID registry allows you and all other data providers to contribute towards data integration on the web.

What are Cofactor IDs?

Just like ISO country codes unambiguously represent countries, Cofactor IDs identify all types of real-world entities and abstract concepts.

Why?

When topics are encoded by all data producers with the same Cofactor IDs, the information about those topics can be integrated more easily from different websites.

How to use?

Look up the Cofactor ID of any topic you reference and use it to make your dataset part of the universally understood and adopted linked data graph.

A non-technical introduction, or Many things have a million different names

Did you know there are more than 10 different ways people write "the United States" (US, U.S., USA, etc.)? And they are really all just talking about one single place, one country. Because of that, when it comes to finding, linking, reconciling, or organizing multiple layers of information, words are not the best solution.

The guys at ISO figured this out a long time ago when they developed country codes so that people and computers wouldn't get confused. Those country codes act as universal IDs designating countries as entities.

Now say you're a product guy at a big music site, and you want to pull in feeds of lyrics, and videos, and photos from all of your data suppliers. ISO doesn't define IDs for every single musical artist, so everyone uses different IDs to refer to the same band and a lot of the feeds don't really match up. So you've got to reconcile them, and pull in updates, and deal with merges, and deletes, and splits — it's a nightmare.

What if there was a better way? — Welcome to Cofactor ID.

Cofactor has been in the process of building the infrasructure for assigning IDs to all kinds of entities to allow others to generate connected datasets that can be easily integrated with other sources of information.

How is this going to help you? Let's say you're a guy writing the movie review. If you tag the movie with its Cofactor ID, it's like you're using the country code instead of one of its names in your dataset. When someone comes across your review, they can easily follow which movie you are talking about.

Or say you're that product guy at the music site. Instead of spending months doing messy integrations and maintaining all those feeds, you can just plug in the Cofactor ID, and suddenly, everything just works. It's like a switchboard for all the datasets on the web.

Are you kidding me? This stuff sounds impossible! — Well, that's what they also said about the web.

And it's not just countries, movies or bands. Cofactor IDs work for millions of entities and abstract concepts in thousands of categories. Cofactor ID makes your site and your datasets smarter. It's time to connect to the web.